


melodrama

by nylondreams



Category: Red Velvet (K-pop Band)
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Blood, Cigarettes, Crying, F/F, Father Figures, First Kiss, Inspired by Lorde (Musician), Killing, Late at Night, Murder, Reader-Insert, Sad Ending, also johnten is just mentioned i probably shouldn't have tagged them, shitty father figures amirite aha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-06 02:27:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20283868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nylondreams/pseuds/nylondreams
Summary: Kang Seulgi is the only person you've ever managed to love, the only person who truly sees you for what you are, and you've just framed her for murder.





	melodrama

**Author's Note:**

> this is what happens when you're drunk, listening to melodrama on repeat in your bed at night, feeling all kinds of rage, summer heat on your skin (in my head i do everything right x100).
> 
> english isn't my first language.
> 
> thank you for reading!

Kang Seulgi is the only person you’ve ever managed to love, though in your own way, and you know that. She does too, oh, she does, too. She knows so much, compared to you. It only makes sense because when you look at her, all there’s to be seen is eyes too bright to not be holy, hair curling gently, soft, angel-like, hands strong, fingers looking like they belong to a goddess reaching straight out to you. She makes you wonder how everyone in the world isn’t in love with her, and then you think to yourself, maybe selfishly, _she is only mine, and I don’t mind that_.

Yet, you fuck things up. You fuck things up like it’s second nature, you settle into that routine so comfortably every time that it may as well be like breathing for you. Or blinking. It hurts, to think even if you love somebody, you’ll let them down some day. Some day.

The first time you and Seulgi kiss is in summer in the public pool bathrooms, her mouth tasting like Melona and chlorine, and everything you’ve ever dreamt of, like a deep breath and a clear mind. Like salvation. Like sin. When you kiss her all you want to think about is her closed lids and chipped nail polish, nails digging into your sides over the nylon of your swimsuit, ad how cold her body must be under her bikini. How you want to warm her up, by turning the shower on and pulling her under it, by hugging her, by rubbing your hands on her sides, by letting your lips travel down, down, down. You want to feel okay, you want to feel approved, you want be normal, you want too much.

All there is to it is the face of your father behind your eyelids.

He makes you feel inadequate, he makes you feel wrong, he takes you out of context so you try to kiss harder. You try to grip harder and you try to convince yourself that you can do this, that you feel nice, and you can deal with this. Then somebody enters the locker room, and it’s over.

It’s over.

You want to punch the cold green tiles right next to you but Seulgi’s smile and wet hair stops you. Your world is her winking left eye and you want to get away so terribly. You forget to shower and go home soaking, chlorine everywhere on your skin.

Seulgi must be a godly creature. You’re lying on her bed one afternoon, surrounded by her smell (it’s the pillow and the blanket, it’s her shirt on you and her wet towel by your head that she threw unceremoniously), and think you are right, because she can deal with you. She knows what’s wrong with you before you need to voice your thoughts, and she doesn’t think you’re a liability. She doesn’t think you’re too much, she thinks you’re just right. Well, she’s more than just right, even though you’ll never be able to tell her that. You are a fucking loser.

A summer song is playing on her phone sitting on her dressing table. You don’t know it, and it wouldn’t matter even if you did, because you’re busy watching her brush her hair, head leaning slightly to the left. Fingers following the brush, raking through her hair. Her shoulders, wet with droplets of water. She smiles you through the mirror and you can only turn your head because her collarbones are the only thing you see when you look in the mirror. You hate her because you love her, you decide. You hate her because she’s the most perfect person in this world. She stands up and the towel around her figure falls down. You see it on the window next to your head.

You don’t dare looking at her, you don’t have the courage to do that, so you watch her reflection instead; how she throws her head back and sprays perfume on her tender neck. How she rubs a lotion on her arms and chest, on her legs and hands, working on each finger delicately. You hate how you diminish her to a reflection even when you’re with her. A light breeze dances with the curtains and you lose the reflection momentarily, and blame your breathlessness on the summer heat. When you close your eyes, you can see starts dancing behind your eyelids, on a stark black ocean. When you open them, Seulgi is there. Nose to nose, naked chest to chest, hip to hip.

And now, lip to lip.

The sky is burning.

It’s burning in flames; red and peach and golden and pink, and clouds are floating idly on the wide canvas, in no rush to do anything, absolutely nothing at all. The sky leaves you breathless, it looks like it’s about to explode. In your dreams, it sometimes does.

You sometimes feel like at some point, your life is divided into two parts. Life before her, and life after her. The line is a showy dark crack, ugly like the rest of everything that belongs with you, except her, of course.

This is what life before her looks like. Your apartment, take one.

The evening sky is slowly dissolving into a soft lilac before your eyes, the moon white as a pearl, late summer air still relatively warm. You have your legs up in the air as if you’re floating.

The bars of railings are pressing into your inner thighs annoyingly, and your legs are barely fitting between them anyway so all in all, it’s uncomfortable in all ways. The fire escape consists of rattling stairs and scrappy pieces of metal so you’re almost sure if you were to swing your legs with a bit more force, or shake or twist enthusiastically, it would crack and break, and fall from where it’s pressed against the back side of the apartment building.

With a cherry cigarette clasped between your fingers, you feel quite cam, for some reason. The sounds of nightlife and traffic carry into your ears like some kind of disoriented song, somewhere below, from the streets and alleyways. You feel detached from all of this in a way and it still depresses you that down there on the real world, where everything happens, someone is probably getting kissed for the first time, holding hands without fear, smiling without a care, and there is you, smoking alone on an archaic fire escape, hiding from your drunk asshole of a father.

That is, if you can even call it hiding. More like a small escape when dealing with him gives you this miserable headache and something like nausea, except it’s in your heart and the walls around you keep closing in. You aren’t too sure what it means; a claustrophobia of heart.

You huff a cherry smelling breath to get a strand of hair in front of your eyes out of the way, and your gaze falls on your knuckles. It makes you feel ugly. Disposable.

You’re startled when a loud noise of a window being opened interrupts the silence that was never there to begin with.

Now, with her, it’s something like this.

Seulgi peeks her head out of the open window placed on your right side, only a meter or so away from the fire escape. That’s Johnny’s apartment. Johnny and Ten’s.

“I heard the crashing noise coming from your apartment, so I came down here instead,” she explains, although her voice sounds a bit broken, choked. You imagine Seulgi knocking on your door and your dad answering it, stinking drunk, and something burns inside you so bad you want to rip yourself apart. “I knew you’d be here.”

She climbs out the window to sit beside you and closes the window behind herself.

“Hi.” She says.

Then it’s easy for you to decide no burning sky or whatever beautiful scenery there is or has been to ever compare to her. It looks like she has stardust stuck in her bleached hair, soft strands shining as if they’re still holding on to the golden hour. The sun kissed cheekbones, golden-brown. The small space left in your chest is filling with sparks, it almost feels bad.

You don’t speak, just look at each other briefly before turning to look up at the sky again and you decide she looks like a doll, illuminated by the warm light coming from Johnny-and-Ten’s apartment: the slope of her nose is the exact definition of elegant, and her highlighted cheekbones reflect the light better than they’re supposed to, somehow. Her lips are bursting red, splotches of red also on her cheeks and you wonder, what if you were to fall in love with this world? The sky and the sunset? The colours and the shades, what if you were to fall in love with this cruel place where you easily bruised and broke? More often than not, you wonder if such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw’ exists outside literature. Before her, you thought it didn’t. Now though, you think it does and yours is this: a morbid longing to find something (someone) that means something. Anything. You sometimes sit out in the cold just to feel.

_One day,_ you say to her, _I’ll kill my father_. _And we’ll run away_. 

Seulgi’s face lights up, and, well, it is beautiful. It’s vivid and memorable in the way bright billboards and neon club lights are, enticing you in a distinct way. You can feel your throat is dry as hell, and your mouth is as wet as sandpaper, but you don’t have your bottle of water with you. Drinking Seulgi in, though, only makes you feel even thirstier than before, because you’re in a deserted island with no source of water but the wide ocean surrounding you, and everybody knows salty water doesn’t quench thirst.

_You’re coward_, your brain keeps on repeating, _you’re a coward, you’re a coward, you’re a coward_. You’re afraid of pulling the trigger, telling secrets or risking anything. It’s suffocating, but at least you have your reasons. Another scream comes, your dad, again, and let’s talk about bad home lives, right? You think, you shouldn’t mistake overdose of cocaine to uncured tetanus. You think, don’t mix sleeping pills with cheap beer and mistake it to closure. You want to break your own fingers sometimes; an open wound, bleeding to death.

It’s melodrama, it’s a tragedy, it’s saddening how eventually you’ll let Seulgi down. Your most beloved.

You’ll do it with your head in her lap, you know it. You’ll do it hugging her, wetting her cheeks with your tears, wetting her clothes with your dad’s blood in your hands, and she’ll accept it. You’ve never learned to get back up after a fight, it’s just a way down and you go and go.

Until it happens, you’ll count the days.

You’ll count all the ice creams you’ve eaten together, all her fingers she stroked through your hair, all the sneak outs you managed, all the late night talks you pretend didn’t burn your heart from the inside out. Pretend it doesn’t feel like breathing smoke right out of the belly of a house on fire. World is cold and hard. Seulgi, you think, is soft and warm, the total opposite of what you deserve.

It’s not like you chose this, however.

You didn’t choose to have a drunk, homophobic shit as your father, you didn’t choose to be so goddamn heartless all the time, you didn’t choose to be so emotionally constipated. The only conscious choice you made was Seulgi and all you can do is to hold onto her because you don’t know how to let go either. It’s all or nothing is not the best mindset, they say, but you can’t even bring yourself to care. Not with a baseball bat in your hands, swinging it violently, screaming your lungs out, crying. Not when it’s too late.

This isn’t what you wanted, this is the opposite of what you wanted, but it’s exactly what you wanted too, at the same time, is such a thing possible? Shaky fingers holding a phone, barely seeing the screen, shaky voice reaching to your lover’s ears in three in the morning, the world around you, _shaking_.

The love of your life welcomes you with an open embrace, and doesn’t mind the blood on her clothes, nor face. You think, _I’m red with love_. Red is such a strong colour.

It’s on her pyjamas, on her arms, on her lips and polished fingernails. You cry violently, images of broken ribs and a bruised face holding you hostage, the smell of iron stuck in your nose like cotton being pushed inside you from your nostrils. You can’t even dare look at her face, even though all you want is to look at her face for an eternity and longer, and you are having a hard time differentiating the sounds around you, is it the police sirens? Is it something from the inside? Your heart giving up, perhaps? Seulgi is humming a melody into your ear, holding you so tight all your broken pieces are coming together, and you can’t stop the crying for a goddamn _second_.

_In my head I do everything right,_

_ In my head I do everything right,_

_ In my head I do everything right,_

_ In my head I do everything right,_

_ In my head—_

She will take the fall for you. Red is the colour of the skies, your bruised knees and her lipstick, the love bites you gave her long ago, and red is the colour of shame, your self-hatred burning neon bright. You won’t even visit her.


End file.
